Especially for our Patrons in Tier 2 and 3 we have made another Indie Dev interview! This time, we couldn’t wait to hear more about Golden Orb Studios, developers of Siebenstreich’s Nerdventure (for which you can find our review here). This is a short version, a sample of the interview. Want to read it all?
This time we had with Golden Orb is a German design studio with two women at the helm, Sonja Hawranke and Katharina Glowka. We asked them some questions about Golden Orb, about how Siebenstreich’s Nerdventure came to life, what inspired them to make the game and what their biggest challenge was making it.
Of course, LadiesGamers is always about the personal story in any interview, so we asked them about their work-life balance at the studio, what tips they have for people thinking to develop their own game, what their plans for the future are and what games the ladies enjoy themselves.
Here’s the first part of the interview as a sample!
The Frog Prince
Tell us about you and about Golden Orb
Katharina: Sonja and I started as interns within a year from each other at a game studio in Cologne and were both offered full-time contracts after the internship. That was about 13 years ago, so we gathered a decent amount of work experience in the gaming industry before founding our own studio. Sonja is our software engineer, I’m our graphics artist, and we share game design tasks as well as administrative work.
What’s behind the name of your studio?
Katharina: Our studio name “Golden Orb” represents the iconic item from the fairytale “The Frog Prince”. It’s supposed to visualize our connection to the fairytales on which our games are based on. We take traditional lore, rewrite it and then generously sprinkle it with current day topics to create fun, yet thought-provoking games.
Plenty of Pop Culture References
What inspired you to make Siebenstreich’s Nerdventure?
Katharina: Siebenstreich’s Nerdventure is a 2D pop culture fairytale adventure where contemporary topics like sustainability, diversity and others are transported into a fantasy world. These are topics which are important to us in some way. Its story is wrapped into a pen & paper RPG setting with quite a few allusions to game classics, movies and (nerd) lore. Since Sonja and I are both fans of 2D adventures and both played a pen & paper game together for some time, we sort of combined our former hobbies with our vision of displaying modern issues in a
traditional fairytale.
……There’s a lot more the ladies at Golden Orb had to tell us. Like how they challenged common stereotype fairytale types, who would enjoy Siebenstreich the most, how the budget was a constant worry, which tools they used to make the game and much more.
Want to read the rest of the interview too? Become a patron in Tier 2 or 3!
